September 8, 1900 the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States obliterated the thriving city of Galveston, Texas.
Galveston after the 1900 hurricane – Photographer unknown – Texas State Library
Perhaps pollution and increased CO2 emissions cause amnesia!
For those who believe in Man-Made Global Warming, allow me to present to you this inconvenient truth. In 1900 a category 4 hurricane hit Galveston, Texas, leveling the city. This was before pollution from China, India, and USA. Autos had just started being built. No emissions into the air yet. No hole in the ozone. So what caused this one, Liberal environmentalists? Trump wasn’t even born yet (Although some on the Left might claim that Trump probably travelled back in time, causing the Hurricane).
The hurricane was so bad that a 2008 article in Time Magazine reported it as “The deadliest hurricane in U.S. history”.
The deadliest hurricane in U.S. history was not Hurricane Katrina. Not even close. It was the storm that hit Galveston, Texas, exactly 108 years and one week ago. That storm killed about 8,000 Americans and leveled what had been the largest city in Texas. It was a vicious storm with 130 mph winds.
In Galveston, they call it the “Great Hurricane” (Sept. 8, 1900). This was way before hurricanes were named, which didn’t start until 1953. In 1900 Galveston was only about 9 feet above sea level. When the hurricane made landfall on September 8th it had estimated winds of 145 miles per hour at landfall, making it a Category 4 storm on the Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale. The hurricane brought a 15 foot tall storm surge along with these winds. The surge was so powerful it washed over the entire island, knocking buildings off their foundations and then pounding them into scraps of wood. In total over 3600 houses were destroyed.
Many of us thought that Hurricane Katrina caused the most U.S. deaths (1,800, with an additional 700 still missing), but it was dwarfed by the Galveston Hurricane, which was the deadliest natural disaster to ever hit the US, claiming over 6,000 lives.
Did you know that The University Of California, Berkeley and Berkeley College (Yale University) are named after a devout Christian and slave owner?
All across the country, centuries-old names that adorn statues, buildings and streets are under siege.
Once widely honored in a different era, men whose names are etched on statues and college campuses have become symbols of hate. Mind numbed people inspired in part by, The Alt-Left Media, corrupt politicians and the Black Lives Matter movement, are calling for the removal of these symbols honoring people connected to slavery, colonialism and the Confederacy.
Maybe these same people, who are so open-minded their brains are falling out, should demand that these two institutions along with Berkeley California be renamed.
Berkeley College (Yale University)
Berkeley College is a residential college at Yale University, opened in 1934. The eighth of Yale’s 12 residential colleges, it was named in honor of George Berkeley (1685–1753), dean of Derry and later bishop of Cloyne, in recognition of the assistance in land and books that he gave to Yale in the 18th century.
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley, (also referred to as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, Cal Berkeley, and California) is a public research university located in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1868, Berkeley is the oldest of the ten research universities affiliated with the University of California system and is ranked as one of the world’s leading research universities and the top public university in the United States. In 1869 Frederick H. Billings was a trustee of the College of California and suggested that the college be named in honor of the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley.
Bishop George Berkeley bought 3-5 slaves during his brief stay in the New World between 1728 and 1731, to work on his Rhode Island plantation, Whitehall. When Berkeley returned to Europe in 1731, he donated the plantation to Yale.
Yale turned payments from the plantation into its first set of scholarships. At this time, the plantation likely continued being worked by slaves. Charles Handy leased Whitehall farm from Yale, and sent Yale payments that would fund scholarships. The Rhode Island census, in 1774, shows that the household of Charles Handy included: “Blacks: 4”.
It is likely that these four black people included in Handy’s household were slaves. In his study of slavery in the 1774 Rhode Island census, Louis Masur explains:
Data derived from a census conducted by Rhode Island’s General Assembly permits us to answer with certainty such questions as who held slaves, how many they owned, and what patterns of slaveholding emerged within the colony … While we cannot ascertain the precise status of the blacks living in white households, corroborating evidence such as newspaper advertisements indicates that the vast majority of the black residents were held as slaves, apprentices, or in some other dependent relationship … If anything, the Census of 1774 underrepresented the extent to which blacks lived in some kind of bonded relationship to white families.
The density of slave owning white households in Newport county in 1774 was almost as high as the density of slave owning white households in the American South during the Civil War. It would be normal for someone farming a Newport plantation to use slaves to work the land.
Words etched into the floor of Berkeley College today explain:
After expenses, the income from the house and farm [Whitehall] was to support two students of the college chosen “without favor or affection” as the best at Latin and Greek after a public examination. The “Berkeley Premiums” as they came to be called, are still awarded in the Yale Classics Department.
George Berkeley had slaves working his plantation until he left in 1731. The profits earned by leasing the Whitehall plantation after 1732 funded Yale’s first scholarships. The person leasing the plantation around the time of the 1774 census included four black people as members of his household, and most black people so listed were slaves.
Assuming slaves worked the old Berkeley plantation, then Yale’s own land was worked by slaves, and Yale’s first scholarship was funded for up to 50 years with money earned from slave labor. It is for the gift of this plantation that his name is honored today with the name of “Berkeley college“.
Berkeley’s Slaves
After coming to the colonies, Berkeley bought a plantation in Newport, Rhode Island-the famous “Whitehall.” On October 4, 1730, Berkeley purchased “a Negro man named Philip aged Fourteen years or thereabout.” A few days later he purchased “a negro man named Edward aged twenty years or thereabouts.” On June 11, 1731, “Dean Berkeley baptized three of his negroes, ‘Philip, Anthony, and Agnes Berkeley'”.
Berekley’s sermons explained to the colonists why Christianity supported slavery, and hence slaves should become baptized Christians:
It would be of advantage to their [slave masters’] affairs to have slaves who should ‘obey in all things their masters according to the flesh, not with eye-service as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, as fearing God;’ that gospel liberty consists with temporal servitude; and that their slaves would only become better slaves by being Christian.
In truth, rewriting history is positively Orwellian, and a terribly dangerous path. History teaches us a lesson. You can’t change it. Nor should you. It does not end racism.
“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” ~ George Orwell, 1984
Five men unanimously decide to stand underneath an…exploding nuclear bomb
Despite what many might think, these men were not crazy and they were not being punished. Amazingly, each man except for one volunteered to participate in this. It was July 19th, 1957 when five Air Force officers and a lone photographer stood alongside one another about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The specific area on the ground had been marked “Ground Zero.
Population 5” on a hand written sign that was pushed into the soft ground located adjacent to them. Directly overhead, two F-89 jets come roaring into the view. Then suddenly one of them ejected a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead.
The men wait, and the countdown begins. Just 18,500 feet above them, the missile was detonated and blew up. Therefore, these men intentionally stood directly under an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of the men even looked up while wearing sunglasses to say that a person would have to see this with their own eyes to believe it.
The narrator was enthusiastically shouting, “It happened! The mounds are vibrating. It is tremendous! Directly above our heads! Aaah!” The footage was ascertained from the government archives, and it was shot by the United States Air Force (at the behest of Col. Arthur B. “Barney” Oldfield, public information officer for the Continental Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs). The point was to depict the relative safety of a low-grade nuclear explosion in the atmosphere. To further prove this, two colonels, two majors and a fifth officer volunteered to stand under the blast. The cameraman, George Yoshitake did not volunteer.
It was at a time when the country was concerned about nuclear fallout. The Air Force wanted to take the initiative to reassure its people that it was safe to use atomic weapons to counter the similar weapons being developed by Russia. But they did not win this particular argument.
The Silence
This film provides a number of things to ponder and worry about. One odd detail was how the bomb exploded in complete silence with an abrupt white flash. The soldiers flinch before there is a slight pause in the action. Suddenly, there is a roar. (“There it is! The ground wave!”). The sky went black and air seemed to turn to fire.
Simple physics can explain the pause. Light travels faster than sound which is why the light came before the sound. Many movies will artificially shift the sound in order to make the viewer think the flash and the sound happened at the same time.
‘A Long, Thundering Growl’
It is different if you are actually there. Alex Wellerstein is a science historian who came upon an unaltered and scary recording. He posted it on Restricted Data; The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. Supposedly, it came from a Russian correspondent that had been sifting through the United States National Archives. The Russians uncovered a recording of an American atomic test from 1953. It shows a big flash of white that blanks out the entire sky; followed by a thick cloud of ash and finally a fireball appears. Thirty seconds passes. Wellerstein said,
“Put on some headphones and listen to it all the way through — it’s much more intimate than any other test film I’ve seen. You get a much better sense of what these things must have been like, on the ground, as an observer, than from your standard montage of blasts. Murmurs in anticipation, the slow countdown over a megaphone; the reaction at the flash of the bomb; and finally — a sharp bang, followed by a long, thundering growl. That’s the sound of the bomb.”
The sound is one no person would want to hear in their lifetime, but this is the safest way to eavesdrop. The initial two minutes of the video does not have much happening. Then the countdown starts, and at 2:24 from the top the bomb explodes. At 2:54 the blast hits.
A Postscript: What Happened To The Guys In The Bomb Video?
The list of the people who were in the film included, Col. Sidney Bruce, Lt. Col. Frank P. Ball, Major Norman “Bodie” Bodinger, Major John Hughes, Don Lutrel and George Yoshitake (the cameraman, not seen). Based on some follow-up research, the following information was gathered:
Col. Sidney C. Bruce — died in 2005 (age 86)
Lt. Col. Frank P. Ball — died in 2003 (age 83)
Major John Hughes — died in 1990 (age 71)
Major Norman Bodinger — not listed in the database so he may be alive
Don Lutrel — died 1987 (age 63)
Furthermore, the United States government has shelled out about $813 million across 16,000 “down winders” to compensate for the illnesses that were allegedly connected to the bomb testing program. These tests were conducted to prove the safety of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, but clearly they were not safe at all.
